Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 04/15/2010 7:24:19 AM PDT by decimon
ATHENS, Ohio (April 15, 2010) – A new study led by Ohio University scientists suggests that early Native Americans left a bigger carbon footprint than previously thought, providing more evidence that humans impacted global climate long before the modern industrial era.
Chemical analysis of a stalagmite found in the mountainous Buckeye Creek basin of West Virginia suggests that native people contributed a significant level of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere through land use practices. The early Native Americans burned trees to actively manage the forests to yield the nuts and fruit that were a large part of their diets.
“They had achieved a pretty sophisticated level of living that I don’t think people have fully appreciated,” said Gregory Springer, an associate professor of geological sciences at Ohio University and lead author of the study, which was published a recent issue of the journal The Holocene. “They were very advanced, and they knew how to get the most out of the forests and landscapes they lived in. This was all across North America, not just a few locations.”
(Excerpt) Read more at ohio.edu ...
Statlactites stick tight to the ceiling.
> burned trees
Isn’t that carbon neutral?
Has Obama found away to tax these irresponsible folks for their blatant disregard for the environment?
Early Native American SUV ping!
The chainsaw was not invented yet. That’s a fine piece of journalism. / sarcasm
I was thinking that we might be dealing with the residue of cooking fires I side a poorly ventilated cave - ones that were continuously inhabited. I also wonder how all that forest fire smoke gets forced into your typical cave unless there’s already a fair amount of cross ventilation?
“I side” = inside. Darned i-phone keypad!
The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
Stalagmites reveal past climateThe researchers examined four stalagmites from Crevice Cave, the longest cave known in Missouri, located about 75 miles south of St. Louis. The stalagmites appeared to have been broken by natural forces such as floods or earthquakes and were found about 80 feet below the ground surface, says Dorale. The team determined when the stalagmite layers were deposited, then deduced paleotemperatures and the general types of vegetation growing in the vicinity during that era by examining the carbon and oxygen isotopes within the calcium carbonate. The profile showed that the area had been covered by forest 75,000 years ago, but by 71,000 years ago, it was savannah and by 59,000 years ago, had become a prairie. Between 55,000 and 25,000 years ago, the forest had returned and persisted. Dorale explains that the pattern is consistent with climatological records from the ocean.
by Kristina Bartlett and Devra Wexler
GeoTimes, March 1999
Carbon clock could show the wrong timeA study led by physicist Warren Beck of the University of Arizona discovered an enormous peak in the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere between 45 thousand and 11 thousand years ago. Living organisms and some geological features absorb stable carbon-12 and radioactive carbon-14, which are present in the air in a well-known ratio. Scientists use carbon dating to determine when objects ceased to absorb carbon by measuring how much of the carbon-14 - which has a half-life of 5730 years - has decayed. Beck and colleagues tested slices of a half-metre long stalagmite that grew between 45 000 and 11 000 years ago in a cave in the Bahamas. Galactic cosmic rays create most of the carbon-14 in our atmosphere, while solar cosmic rays generate a smaller fraction. The Earth is partially shielded from galactic cosmic rays by its own magnetic field and the solar magnetic field, which fluctuates as the solar cycle proceeds. These effects are predictable and are thought to have changed little in the last million years - which means they cannot explain the glut of carbon-14. The team speculates that a supernova shock wave could have produced a flurry of cosmic rays.The Testimony of Radiocarbon Dating
and The Pitfalls of Radiocarbon Dating
by Immanuel Velikovsky
Stalagmite discovery throws doubt on carbon dating
by Charles Arthur Technology Editor
Carbon Dating Revision May Rewrite History
Dating study 'means human history rethink'
Carbon dating 'might be wrong by 10,000 years'
by Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Radiometric Dating: An Exercise in Faith
by Mark E. Howerter
Caves reveal clues to UK weatherAt Pooles Cavern in Derbyshire, it was discovered that the stalagmites grow faster in the winter months when it rains more. Alan Walker, who guides visitors through the caves, says the changes in rainfall are recorded in the stalactites and stalagmites like the growth rings in trees. Stalagmites from a number of caves have now been analysed by Dr Andy Baker at Newcastle University. After splitting and polishing the rock, he can measure its growth precisely and has built up a precipitation history going back thousands of years. His study suggests this autumn's rainfall is not at all unusual when looked at over such a timescale but is well within historic variations. He believes politicians find it expedient to blame a man-made change in our weather rather than addressing the complex scientific picture.
by Tom Heap
Saturday, December 2, 2000
Carbon dating 'might be wrong by 10,000 years'Their study could force a reappraisal of when certain events occurred, notably in the period when modern humans lived alongside Neanderthals in Europe... Dr David Richards of the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, made the study with colleagues in Arizona and Minnesota. He said: "Beyond about 20,000 years ago there are some dramatic swings in radiocarbon concentration, which means the age offset between the radiocarbon age and true calendar age can be up to 8,000 years." Radiocarbon dating, which depends on the steady decay of carbon-14, is less reliable if an artefact is older than 16,000 years. But the changes in radiocarbon, and dating, fluctuate greatly up to 45,000 years, the limit of the study.
by Roger Highfield
Saturday 30 June 2001Extremely large variations of atmospheric 14C concentration during the last glacial periodA long record of atmospheric 14C concentration, from 45 to 11 thousand years ago (ka), was obtained from a stalagmite with thermal-ionization mass-spectrometric 230Th and accelerator mass-spectrometric 14C measurements. This record reveals highly elevated Delta14C between 45 and 33 ka, portions of which may correlate with peaks in cosmogenic 36Cl and 10Be isotopes observed in polar ice cores. Superimposed on this broad peak of Delta14C are several rapid excursions, the largest of which occurs between 44.3 and 43.3 ka. Between 26 and 11 ka, atmospheric Delta14C decreased from approximately 700 to approximately 100 per mil, modulated by numerous minor excursions. Carbon cycle models suggest that the major features of this record cannot be produced with solar or terrestrial magnetic field modulation alone but also require substantial fluctuations in the carbon cycle.
Beck JW, Richards DA, Edwards RL,
Silverman BW, Smart PL, Donahue DJ,
Hererra-Osterheld S, Burr GS,
Calsoyas L, Jull AJ, Biddulph D.
Science
pub 2001 May 10
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2488774/posts
Oxford University is involved in a research project to unearth 30,000 year old climate records, before they are lost forever. The rings of preserved kauri trees, hidden in New Zealand’s peat bogs, hold the secret to climate fluctuations spanning back to the end of the last Ice Age... carbon dating and other analyses of the kauri tree rings. The trees store an immense amount of information about rapid and extreme climate change in the past. For instance, wide ring widths are associated with cool dry summer conditions... Tree rings are now known to be an excellent resource for extracting very precise and detailed data on atmospheric carbon from a particular time period. Therefore this study could help plug a large gap in our knowledge of climate change by extending historical weather records that only date back to the mid-nineteenth century... The research will focus on the last 30,000 years, but some trees date back 130,000 years. The period towards the end of the last Ice Age is particularly difficult to understand. This unique archive of kauri trees is likely to be lost within the next ten years because the timber is so highly-prized for furniture, arts and crafts. Kauri (Agathis australis) are conifer trees buried in peat bogs across northern New Zealand.
Oh, yes, it was very sophisticated to set forest fires to burn down the trees when the forests became to thick for the underbrush of berries and nut bearing apex trees to grow. The Indians in the Northwest were still doing this in the nineteenth century. The purpose was to make foraging easier.
We learned that seals were coming to a bad end and being mummified by nature in Antarctica in 1200 A.D. That was interesting and we wondered what was happening in Antarctica at that time...one of the technicians... noticed that a seal carcass that he himself had shot for dog-meat and that got left out through the winter... [looked] just like the mummified seals that they had been sending in. So without telling too many people what he was doing, he sent this mummified seal to be carbon-dated and do you know it was dated to 1200 A.D., and he had shot it the year before. When that was made public it really caused a storm...
We had two successive volcanic eruptions on the island of Tonga. There were human remains, then a layer of lava, then more human remains, then a layer of lava. We took charcoal out of both layers and had them both dated -- and we didn't tell them, the dating people, which layer which came from -- and to our amazement we learned that the whole island of Tonga has rotated through 180 degrees and is now upside down. The top layer is older than the bottom layer of the charcoal.
|
|
|||
Gods |
Thanks decimon. |
||
|
· Discover · Nat Geographic · Texas AM Anthro News · Yahoo Anthro & Archaeo · Google · · The Archaeology Channel · Excerpt, or Link only? · cgk's list of ping lists · |
|||
I will not accept this Pavlovian conditioning. The Greenhouse theory is bunk. Period.
Stalagmites are the ones that point up.
You do know that that guy is from Italy, don't you?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
